[Noisebridge-discuss] I got groped at noisebridge at hackmeet

[hep]

Tony: you are apparently angry that we dared to notice your offensive, and
i would say abusive, behavior. This is common when people act like a total
jackass without realizing/caring that what they are doing is ridiculously
offensive. Allow me to break it down for you.

First off let me reiterate that what you did was terribly offensive at
best, and outright abusive and demeaning to the victim at worst. You
literally used a textbook example of how not to respond to sexual assault
victims. The first thing you did was trivialize her experience, by
insinuating that in any context it would be a desired experience. This
indicates that she should just shrug it off, because being sexually
assaulted against your will is desirable in some other context. Regardless
of your intent (which i assume was to make light of what is a horrible and
demeaning experience that will probably leave the person with a lifetime of
guilt, questions, trauma, and other assorted feelings that they will be
unable to ever escape. This is not really a situation to make light of.
It's like going up to a Bosnian victim in 1991 who lost their entire family
in the Serbian Aggression and making a bunch of genocide jokes. It is not
going to go over well, and you are an asshole if you do that.) this was a
fucked up thing to do. And that is the important part: regardless of your
intent. Because intent is not magical to get you out of the fucked up thing
you said. Even tho you probably did not intend it to be offensive and
abusive, it was and you now need to deal with that. The proper response at
this point would be to accept that you said something dickish and apologize
for it. Not a backhanded apology like "well i am sorry you are so offended
then!" but a real apology that looks something like "i am sorry that my
words hurt you." no qualifiers for your intent, no qualifiers for what you
meant, no attempt to put the blame in the situation on us for "just
misunderstanding what you are trying to do!" but instead taking full
responsibility for saying hurtful things in a very serious environment.

Next you attempted to place all of the blame on the people who noticed your
shitty behavior, as if your shitty behavior is our fault, and if we didn't
call you out on it you would have been in the right. This is not true. This
is a free country where people are allowed to say what they want. You are
allowed to talk like a total asshole if that is the kind of person you want
to be. However other people are also entitled to call you out on your
shitty behavior, and call you a shitbag if they believe that is how you are
behaving. You will notice that everyone was relatively polite about it, not
even calling you an out and out shitbag even though you were behaving as
one. This is obvious proof that we are not reacting out of "anger" or a
"lack of a sense of humor". There is nothing funny about telling a sexual
assault victim that their sexual assault should be trivialized and they
should just get a sense of humor about it. FYI you should probably tune
your sense of humor so that it is actually funny and not stupid and
pathetic. This might have more of a positive gain for you in the future.

Other people on this list chose to immediately side with the aggressor in
questioning the victim. This is also a really shitty thing to do. It
implies that the victim is just a silly woman and doesn't really understand
or recognize abuse. It implies that there is some other situation in which
a stranger grabbing a woman's breast is somehow ok, or acceptable. FYI:
doing this means you are a shitty person, full stop. Instead of immediately
jumping to the aggressors defense (and remember, if it gets to the point of
pressing charges, etc, we have this whole system of paid advocates which
can also be provided for free to stand up for and defend the aggressors
perspective against these charges. Unless you are a close personal friend
of the aggressor, this is probably not the right time to jump
wholeheartedly to their defense and ignore the victimization of the
aggressee.)

Since this list apparently needs a refresher on what to do in cases where
someone is speaking up about their sexual assault, I will go ahead and drop
a few links here.

http://meloukhia.net/2010/06/what_to_do_when_someone_approaches_to_tell_you_about_sexual_assault_or_abuse.html

http://www.gradientlair.com/post/26371065297/silencing-tactics

http://persephonemagazine.com/2012/07/27/savannah-dietrich-and-silencing-survivors/

And as an aside: I am not sure how you Tony could mistake this situation as
incredibly serious and hurtful for the victim. From her first post it was
obvious that this incident was really damaging and hurtful to her. So I am
not sure why you would think it was at all appropriate to bring on the
jokes "before you knew the severity of this issue", but I eagerly await
your explanation of how some sexual assault cases are totally the right
time for happy fun jokey time, but others are not.

-hep
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